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A controversial facial-recognition company working with police departments across the US is reportedly connected to white nationalism and the far-right

A software startup that scraped billions of images from major web services including Facebook, Google, and YouTube is selling its tool to law enforcement agencies across the United States.

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Thon-That
  • The app can be loaded on to smartphones, and used to instantly identify unknown people. The point of the software is to match unknown faces with publicly available photos, thus identifying crime suspects.
  • But the startup, Clearview AI, has faced major criticism for the way it obtains images: By taking them without permission from major services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
  • Moreover, despite Clearview's stated goal of working with law enforcement, several reports point to a far wider clientele including a string of billionaire investors, the founder's friends, and retailers ranging from Walmart to Macy's.
  • In a new Huffington Post report , Clearview AI and its founder and CEO, Hoan Ton-That, are directly linked to the far-right.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
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Police departments across the United States are paying tens of thousands of dollars apiece for access to software that identifies faces using images scraped from major web platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

The software is produced by a company called Clearview AI an under-the-radar tech startup supported by a slew of somewhat better-known investors, including early Facebook backer Peter Thiel and Texas-based investor Hal Lambert, most notable for running an investment fund with the "MAGA" ticker symbol.

So, what does Clearview's software do? It identifies people using images scraped without permission from the web and social media platforms to create a searchable database. If you want to identify someone, you simply upload a photo or snap a new one, and Clearview's software attempts to make a match.

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The company is run by a relatively unknown name in the tech world: an Australian named Hoan Ton-That. But a newly published expos from HuffPost digs into Ton-That's past, as well as Clearview AI's founding. The report reveals Ton-That's connections to the so-called far-right and white nationalist movements, and to members of both.

Among the people Ton-That reportedly is or once was connected with are the far-right provacateur Chuck Johnson, Pizzagate conspiracy peddler Mike Cernovich , and Pax Dickinson, who has been known to express sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist views on Twitter. (Dickinson was the former CTO of Business Insider. He resigned in 2013 after reports surfaced the offensive tweets.)

Moreover, one Clearview AI employee, Marko Jukic, reportedly has a lengthy history of ethnonationalist rhetoric published online under a pseudonym. Jukic was responsible for pitching the company's technology to police departments across the US.

"[I]f you spend a few hours letting your disenchanted friends and family know that it's OK to use the word 'n-----' [and] point out that democracy is a miserable failure, you will have accomplished far more concrete good in the world than you would have by spending a few hours doing almost anything else," Jukic reportedly wrote.

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According to Clearview AI, following HuffPost's inquiry, Jukic was let go from the company.

"I was shocked by and completely unaware of Marko Jukic's online writings under a different name," Ton-That said in a statement sent by Clearview AI representatives. "As soon as those writings were brought to my attention, we took steps to separate him from the company."

But the HuffPost report details a lengthy, complex history of Clearview AI's CEO interacting with and collaborating with Johnson, Cernovich, Dickinson, and other prominent names associated with the far-right and white nationalist movements.

In November 2016, photos of Ton-That partying with Johnson and Dickinson were posted to Johnson's Facebook page. The party, known as the "Night for Freedom," was thrown by Cernovich in New York to celebrate the election victory of President Trump.

In response to Business Insider's request for comment, Ton-That didn't directly address the photos, or much of the reporting on his history of involvement with promiment members of the far-right and white nationalist movements.

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"I am a proud American of Vietnamese and Australian descent. I am an immigrant to this country, which I support and dearly love, in large part because of its diversity and acceptance of people regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation," his statement read. "I am not a white supremacist or an anti-semite, nor am I sympathetic to any of those views. They are abhorrent and I reject them wholly and without reservation."

Ton-That's statement said he once "explored a range of ideas not out of belief in any of them, but out of a desire to search for self and place in the world. I have finally found it, and the mission to help make America a safer place. To those who have read my words in the Huffington Post article, I deeply apologize for them."

Read the full HuffPost report right here, which goes into far more detail on Clearview AI and its CEO's history.

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SEE ALSO: Clearview AI scraped billions of photos from social media to build a facial recognition app that can ID anyone here's everything you need to know about the mysterious company

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